


Feminist Education

by likeadeuce



Series: Faith/Wesley road trip series [4]
Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-14
Updated: 2010-02-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likeadeuce/pseuds/likeadeuce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Faith and Wesley argue about haircuts, as you do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feminist Education

Wesley backed through the hotel room door with a sack of groceries under each arm. He almost tripped over Faith, who sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning forward, long hair hanging in a dark curtain over her face.

"What are you. . .?" he asked. "Is this some new variety of meditation?"

She jerked her head, and beads of water flew as the hair snapped against her back. "Drying," she leaned forward again, and fiddled with the controls on the heater/AC unit.

He sat on the bed and reached into the bag for ginger ale and canned pasta. "Why don't you get a blow dryer? They can't cost --"

"I'd just lose it. Like the last two" She turned a knob, and the unit coughed and choked, before kicking out a warmer stream of air. "Of course --" With one hand, Faith grabbed a section of her hair and held it out almost to arm's length. The fingers of her other hand parted and mimed a pair of scissors, chopping it short at the chin. "Could probably use one of the blades," she muttered, then turned to Wesley. "What do you think?"

"You're asking what _I_ think?"

A smile curved up one side of her face. "Stranger things have happened. I saw that look in your eye, so spit it out. What do you think?"

"I didn't have any _look_." Wesley went for the can opener and two microwave bowls, keeping his hands and eyes busy, away from Faith. He thought of her hair, long and silky-rich in his hands, the way she would lie above him and let it fall down to play against his chin and neck and chest. "It's none of my business what you do with your hair."

"Uhhh. . .gotta disagree here, Wes. You're the one who's gonna be feeling all over it." She clasped her hands, stretched arms over her head and lay back on the hotel carpet. "Hell," she said, arching her back in a full-body stretch. "You probably care more than I do."

"I do not!" he protested.

Her head swiveled. "You don't like my hair?" she demanded.

"Of course I --" Wesley concentrated on getting the bowls of formerly canned spaghetti into the microwave, while wondering how he had walked into this one. "Of course I like your hair." He turned to face a glaring Faith. "I'm only saying that your -- personal, um, physical integrity is a purely personal. . ."

Faith rocked back to sit on her heels. "You said personal already."

"I'm not supposed to tell you what to do with your hair," he said, running the words together.

She let the silence hang for a moment, until the words finally came slowly. "Way I remember it, a couple hours ago, you were telling me to bend my personal integrity over the sink in there, so you could get a good look in the mirror while I. . ."

"All right!" he cut her off, sinking to a seat on the bed above her. "That's different."

"Because it's sex?" she demanded.

"No -- well -- sort of. Yes." Because in sex, you struck a kind of deal -- with your partner, with yourself -- that the way you conducted yourself and the things you expected from the waking walking working world wouldn't bleed into what you did in the bedroom. Or the lavatory of a one-star motel, as the case might be.

The microwave beeped. Wesley opened it, took out one of the bowls, slimy noodles swimming in bright orange sauce. It sometimes occurred to Wes that one of them ought to know how to cook, but then, what did they have to cook with anyway? Besides, he had never cared a thing about the taste of food, could rarely remember what he had eaten an hour after he was finished. And Faith actually seemed to like this rubbish.

He handed the bowl to Faith, who sat on the floor. She took it and tossed her still-wet hair. "Seriously, Wes. Where do you get this shit?" She wasn't talking about the Chef Boyardee.

It was a good question, and a minute before, he wouldn't have thought he could answer it. He had so many educations -- Oxford, the Council, Angel, Lilah -- , signals that crossed and reinforced or interfered with each other. And then there were a few isolated ideas that came from God-knows-where and had managed to travel undisturbed through the chaos of his life, like the crystal-clear notion a moment before that any man who told his girlfriend what to do with her hair was an incurable chauvinist. Something to do with the seat of feminine power and. . .

"Ellie Marcus," he answered, sitting back on the bed.

"What's that?" Faith mumbled, around a mouthful of spaghetti.

"Who," he said. "I knew her at university. My first proper girlfriend. She gave me my feminist eduation."

"Ohhh-ohhh."

"Not like _that_," he said. "She was in the women's studies division at my college."

"_Women's studies_?" Faith repeated. "They got a whole department for that? Jesus, college kids." She shook her head. "Not that I went to school much, but way I remember it, the volleyball coach covered that shit in the week between the driver's ed carcrash porn and 'why beer will kill you.'" Faith dug into another large mouthful, leaving Wesley to contemplate that, while he had never had a particularly high opinion of American schools, Faith's comment suggested uncharted territories of inadequacy. "It was bullshit," she continued, "All you had to do was tell 'em you were Catholic, and you didn't even have to go. Not that I ever told 'em, I just didn't go. I mean, what, I need to see little cartoon drawings of our friend the uterus?"

Faith was entirely serious, and so Wesley managed to bite back his smile. "That wasn't exactly the kind of feminist education I was referring to." Although in a way it had been. Ellie was the first woman he slept with more than once, and so the first one with whom it hadn't felt like an indiscretion or an accident. Less of a guilty pleasure, and more of a process that required some effort and skill. Looking back, he realized he had probably been terrible, though Ellie hadn't much improved things when she wanted to preface every sex act with a discussion about its sociocultural implications (where did the missionary position come from, anyway, and should she really be giving him head if he wasn't giving it back and no she didn't want him to she didn't feel like that today). The effect of this habit was to condition him to agree with pretty much everything she said about everything (of course Emma Bovary was a victim of society and Marc Anytony was just holding Cleopatra down and nylon stockings were a form of social tyranny) because he was a nineteen-year-old boy with hormones working overtime and of course he was capable of rational discussion but he couldn't have it now because he was going to lose his erection or shoot off early and embarrass himself, so it was easier just to tell her she was right.

He thanked God every day that Ellie had never found out about the Watchers' Council. _A bunch of old men train young girls to do WHAT???_

Faith finished off the spaghetti, raised the empty bowl to her mouth and licked out the last of the sauce. "Sounds exciting," she said.

"You have no idea."

"What happened to her?"

"Oh. . .well. . ." He had at first been enchanted by Ellie's erudite frankness, so foreign either to his overly proper background or the crude culture of the university pubs. At some point after a couple months of relationship, Wesley had started to sense that Ellie was more interested in talking about sex than in the act itself. He hadn't taken it personally; in fact, he had developed an entire theory that she was employing academic rhetoric as a defense mechanism to avoid processing complex and intense emotions. He had been proud enough of this reasoning to explain it to her, not intending a criticism, but hoping she would, well, just shut up and kiss him. "Oh," she said, listening politely. "That's interesting. What I actually think it's more like is that I'm not that attracted to you." Adding with a smile that it probably didn't have anything to do with him personally, because attraction was based on pheremones and intertwined with the sense of smell and did he know that was the same way dogs recognized each other?

After that rather gratuitous humiliation, he thought that she could have had the decency to come out as a lesbian. But a couple months later, he saw her out with the fellow who beat him for a spot on the house cricket team. There was probably a lesson in that, but Wesley had learned by now not to spend too much time scouring his past for lessons. It was a depressing prospect.

"Well?" Faith demanded, snapping him back to the present.

"You know," he said. "The usual." Then looking down to where Faith still sat on the floor, he saw the wet hair falling around her shoulders. "Look, you could probably stand a trim, but I'd hate to see you lose too much of it." He leaned down off the bed, touched her forehead, and ran his hand almost, but not quite to the ends of her hair. "Maybe cut it right there?"

"Fuck you," she said, and Wesley hoped he caught the trace of a smile. "I'll do whatever I want."

"Of course." He smiled back, leaning in to kiss her. "As though I'd have it any other way."


End file.
